She was born before the First World War was over and, at 104 years old, Dr. Brenda Milner was one of the newest inductees to Canada's Walk of Fame (CWOF).
Joining two-time NHL MVP Conner McDavid, media star Rick Mercer, the first Jewish Supreme Court of Canada Justice, Rosalie Silberman Abella, and the iconic high school TV drama Degrassi as this year's inductees, Milner became the oldest living inductee to be honoured for her work on the human brain and cognitive memory formation.
"I feel greatly flattered; it's unexpected," Milner said from her home in Montreal. "I suppose it hasn't quite registered because I wasn't born in Canada, it's my adopted country, and I'm not expecting awards from Canada. It means a lot."
CWOF CEO Jeffrey Latimer said Dr. Milner's research of the human brain was "ground-breaking, and her insatiable curiosity shook up the field of neuroscience with her research on brain health and aging, all from her home base in Montreal in 1950."
Her bio provided by Canada's Walk of Fame tells how she was born in Manchester, England, on July 15, 1918, and began her academic career at Cambridge University three years before Britain entered the Second World War in 1936.
Her master's degree focused on experimental psychology, which was used during the war, focusing on differentiating fighter pilots from bomber pilots in aptitude tests.
She and her husband, Peter, moved to Canada in 1944, and joined the Psychology Institute at the Université de Montréal, where she taught for seven years before resuming her studies at the psychology department at McGill University, where she studied the intellectual effects of temporal lobe damage.
She earned her Ph.D in 1952 and began working at the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital at McGill University despite warnings that a psychologist would not last long in a neurological institute.
"I began to carry out research at the MNI, and knew immediately that this was the kind of work I wished to pursue, whatever the practical difficulties," she said.
She would go on to make significant contributions to scientific understanding of the structure of the human brain through her long-term studies of patients before and after brain excisions.
"An important goal of cognitive neuroscience is linking brain structure to function, as Milner did by showing that the temporal lobes of the brain play a key role in memory," reads the CWOF bio. "The 1957 article (Scoville and Milner, 1957), which published the results of her memory research, has become one of the most cited publications in the field of neuroscience."
In the past two decades Milner has continued to research on how bilingual people's brains handle language and how structures in the brain's medial temporal lobe serve in the memory to locate objects and to recognize an object's features.
The Brenda Milner Foundation was created in 2007 at the Neuro.
Her complete bio can be found here.
